This past week, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) published their new standard for treated and synthetic diamonds. This standard is far more stricter than the FTC (Federal Trade Commission’s) Guides.

Both organizations make it clear that the term 'diamond' can only be used when referencing gemstones that are natural, and the ISO delves even further to notate that a 'natural' stone is "one formed completely by nature without human intervention during the formation.”

Then, they seem to part ways. While the ISO only allows the jewelry industry to utilize the terms laboratory-created, synthetic, and laboratory-grown to describe diamonds that are not made in nature, the FTC allows those three terms, plus the terms man-made and (company name)-created. To be even more finicky, the ISO's new standard does not allow these terms to be abbreviated, such as lab-created or lab-grown, even though those abbreviations have become commonplace in the jewelry industry and the FTC does allow use of these abbreviations.

It is not quite clear whether the term man-made is allowed by the ISO, although Harry Levy, a veteran of the CIBJO and London Diamond Bourse who was a chairman of the committee and helped develop the new standards, believes that man-made is a term that should be allowed. He states that it is actually the best term to use for nonnatural diamonds because "It immediately tells the consumer what the product is. But the committee didn’t want to use it, because the term man-made in some languages translates to being made from man, rather than by man.”

The ISO has also banned the use of the following terms to describe lab-created diamonds:

natural

real

genuine

precious

cultured

cultivated